A Danger to Herself and Others(46)

When the nurse holds out the pill again, I take it. It gets caught in my throat, and I cough so much that my eyes fill with tears.

She slides a latex glove on one of her hands. “Open your mouth,” the nurse says when I finally catch my breath.

“Huh?”

“Open your mouth.” I do. “Now stick out your tongue.” I do. She takes my tongue between her fingers, pulling it from one side of my mouth to the other, then lifting it so she can see what’s beneath it. “Good,” she says finally. Her glove snaps when she takes it off.

I slide my tongue back in my mouth where it belongs.

“You didn’t do that this morning,” I point out.

“You didn’t give me any problems this morning,” she counters. Then she adds, “Sleep well,” with false cheer, as if she didn’t just stick her fingers in my mouth.

The lights go off a few seconds after she closes the door behind her. I get into bed.

From her side of the room, Lucy calls the nurse a name my mother would hate. Mom doesn’t like insults that have a gendered connotation. If she were here, my mother would tell Lucy, Just call a woman a jerk. That’s what you’d call a man.

But my mother isn’t here, so I repeat Lucy’s insult out loud before the yellow pill puts me to sleep.





thirty-two


I should be counting: How many days I’ve been taking the medication. How many blue pills I’ve swallowed, and how many yellow (though I’ve since decided they look more beige than yellow). But I don’t count. I don’t know the exact dosage, so what difference does it make?

There are two nurses who bring me pills. One is the horrible woman with the long black hair and the peach scrubs who tells me to stick out my tongue so she knows I’ve really taken the pills. (She makes me do that every time now, whether I ask questions or not.) The other is a seemingly always-smiling woman with an enormous Afro. Her scrubs are yellow—real yellow, not like the beige-yellow of the sleeping pills—and she always wears red lipstick. She calls me honey, and she never asks me to stick out my tongue. She’s younger than the other nurse, so I guess she’s not as jaded. Not yet, anyway.

Tonight, Lucy tells me not to swallow the sleeping pill. She has something she wants to tell me.

“I don’t have a choice if it’s Nurse Ratched,” I point out.

Lucy shakes her head. “It won’t be.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s not her night.”

At least one of us has been keeping track of the days.



“So, what did you want to tell me?” I ask after lights-out. I spat out the yellow pill and left it to dissolve in my bedpan.

I hear Lucy’s papery clothes rustle as she leaves her bed and crosses the room to sit on the edge of mine. My thin mattress dips beneath her weight. “Don’t you ever wonder what I did to get sent here?”

“You’re bulimic.”

“Also anorexic sometimes,” Lucy counters defensively. “I hardly ate breakfast today.”

“You’re right. Sorry.” I had to put her leftovers on my tray, so the attendants wouldn’t give her a hard time.

“But come on, you know they don’t send us to a place like this just for an eating disorder.”

I squint in the darkness, trying to see my friend in the moonlight, but it’s so dark tonight that I can’t even make out her silhouette. Eating disorders are serious. I’ve read about girls with such severe anorexia that their parents went before judges to have their rights taken away. Girls who are dangerously malnourished might be declared mentally incompetent and sent to places like this by court order. “You’re depressed too. At least, they think you are.”

“I’m not depressed. And I wasn’t depressed before I came here and they pumped me full of antidepressants. I was angry.”

“I don’t think they make pills for that.”

Lucy laughs her hoarse laugh. It’s not a happy sound. “There was this girl in my ballet company. Rhiannon. Just her name was enough to make her think she was better than everyone else.” Lucy shudders with disgust. “She was so skinny. It’s not that she didn’t have to diet. I mean, she didn’t, but that wasn’t the worst part.”

“What was the worst part?”

“She didn’t even care about food. She didn’t worry about deciding what to eat, whether to have a piece of cake, a sip of a soda, a bowl of pasta. While the rest of us complained about having to give up all the ‘bad’ food we loved so we could be dancers, Rhiannon shrugged like it was no big deal. To her, it wasn’t a big deal. She didn’t even want to eat that stuff.” Lucy shifts on the bed, twisting her limbs so she’s sitting cross-legged. Her right knee digs into my side, but I don’t complain. “It was so easy for this girl. And I hated her.”

Lucy stops talking abruptly, like she forgot I was here listening. “What happened?” I prompt.

I pushed her. Not a push, not really. A little tap. Just to see what would happen.

I sit up. Did Lucy say that?

Those are my thoughts, my memories from the night Agnes fell.

We’re getting too old for these games.

Agnes was right. Not that we were too old to play Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. But she also said that you can’t really play with only two people. We tried Never Have I Ever, but that was boring because we’d already told each other all of our secrets. (Except for the fact that I was hooking up with Jonah, and Agnes didn’t even suspect enough to trick me into admitting it, like, Never have I ever hooked up with my best friend’s boyfriend.) (And except for the fact that Agnes had a boyfriend back home, and I didn’t know enough to trick her into admitting that either.)